A motherboard tested
ASUS Maximus IX EXTREME
If the 600 USD/Euro Z270 flagship motherboard doesn't please you - we do not know what will.
We have a look at the Flagship of the ASUS Z270 motherboards, let's all hail the ASUS Maximus IX Extreme from the Republic of Gamers line. The board boasts everything you want and need, has a deep and profound AURA LED lighting system, is all shielded, comes with a full-cover mono-block from Bitspower and then more. Though relatively little RGB bling is injected, this motherboard is compatible with ASUS AURA SYNC, a software suite that allows for multiple choices in additional RGB gear to be driven from that one package. As you guys know, whenever there is a ROG label slapped in front of an ASUS product, you know it's at least high-end. For today's tested motherboard we need to advance even on that as the Maximus IX truly is a bit of an enthusiast beast (despite the fact you can house only quad-core processors on it). ASUS once again used that familiar shielded design, optimized for cooling and armed with a proper feature set. You will spot nice dark looks with almost camouflaged elements, a bit military even as that black seems to have a shade of green in it.
The Maximus IX Extreme motherboard is ASUS AURA SYNC compatible, it does offer much more LED bling compared to the other motherboards, you get an independently configurable chipset heatsink logo, PCI-Express slot, rear IO and power LED configurable options. ASUS kept some stuff relatively simple, ye ol' Realtek 1220 CODEC is used for audio, but then they advanced on that with some seriously quality components. Also onboard is that expensive Thunderbolt chip. Cool to the CPU and it's VRM area asus includes an ROG monoblock from Bitspower, an advanced one as you can monitor flow and temperature and it even has a leak sensor. The fun thing is, you can also cool a your NVMe M.2 SSDs as the heatsink ties into that mono-block. You'll spot eight radiator-fan headers a pre-mounted I/O shield and copper-plated motherboard (well they all are but this one has an outline. Connectivity wise the board ain't shy either with an Intel Ethernet jack, 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO and thus Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) support. Yes, an Intel Gigabit jack (guys, can we just move to onboard 5 Gbps Ethernet jacks please!
This motherboard does comes with everything you need and desire, has four DIMM slots (and the support for up-to ultra-fast DDR4 4133MHz memory), two properly fast M.2 slots, full speed USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) devices and so on. Fitted with that Z270 PCH chipset this motherboard offers three x16 slots and one 1x PCIe. Everything appears and seems very stylish and somewhat dark, the good stuff. But let me stop typing for now, and let's get started with the actual review shall we?
Um yeah, that's going to need some tubing and distilled water !
